London Triptych (9 page)

1894

They held us in
remand for a whole fuckin’ week, the miserable bastards. You ever been in the clink? It’s no party, especially if you’re young and pretty, surrounded by men who’ve not seen a woman in years. None of them would touch Taylor, but they were all over me and other boys. Ironic, when you think about it, that we were up to the kind of stuff in there that had got us locked up in the first place. But we weren’t getting paid.

None of us was charged with anything though, thank God. Taylor thinks they just wanted to scare us—scare him—and they did for a while. I’ve never seen him look so fuckin’ terrified. Yet the first thing he did on our release was set off to find new lodgings. And guess where we live now. Only right in the dirty fuckin’ heart of Westminster, no less. Little College Street. Slap bang behind the Houses of Parliament, right under their fuckin’ noses. I can’t believe the front of that man. But it makes absolute sense. Now we’ve got all the trade we need right on our doorstep, and they don’t have far to travel for a little relief from the tedium of running this country.

So we’re all here now apart from Walter, who had it bad in the slam, pretty thing. Me and the others didn’t mind the attention, but poor Walt kept refusing, so he’d get duffed up as well as fucked. I put up no resistance, being the shameless whore that I am. But when we got out Walter didn’t want to risk getting thrown in the clink again and so he’s gone back to Manchester, though he’ll be worse off there, I don’t doubt.

We may even see him again, soon as boredom sets in. And so with sadness we said goodbye, though he said he’d come visit us whenever he was in need of a good time and I for one hope he does.

So we’re back in the game and this new place is even swankier, though a bit smaller, and we still have to share a bed—though now at least, with Walter gone, it’s two in each.

The night we moved here, Oscar came to investigate the new premises. Said he wanted to make sure we had the right wallpaper, though I think he missed us. He’s become a regular at the house since that first night at Kettner’s. The next week a repeat performance and the next week and the next, a regular little earner it’s turned out to be, entertaining this Mr Oscar Wilde. At the start I was no fonder of him than any of the others, though he’s more amusing than the other swells, who’re always so bloody serious and humourless. To begin with he was just another fool easily parted from his ackers, but he has grown on me, I have to admit, though it took a while, and it took till we were alone, but then I realized that without an audience, once he stops posing and trying to impress, to make people laugh, then he ain’t half bad. But the first time, when it was just me and him, at first I was dreading it because he’s not much to look at, let’s face it, and anyway, all he usually does is watch us perform, so I thought I was in for a dull old time, but I was wrong. He has this way about him that brings out a good feeling, not like some of them who, after kissing them it leaves you feeling dirty and full of regret, and you kind of feel unwell. With him it wasn’t like that. It might sound peculiar but he treated me like I was a girl, sitting me on his knee and wooing me and the like. At first it was funny and I was laughing, but then it became nice and it was a good feeling, the way he petted me and worked at getting me feeling special and all ready to be touched. It sounds queer saying it like that, but that’s how it was, how it is with him.

I didn’t catch on at first just how famous he is, but I soon clocked on that he’s known all over London. He’s been to America and France and Italy and Greece, and everybloodywhere. Places I’ve never heard of and have no clue where they are.

We aren’t alone often because that poncy little prick Bosie’s nearly always with him, but luckily they’re always falling out, and when they do he comes here to see me alone and then he’s like a different person. Bigger, warmer, kinder. He’s a way about him, gentle, I’d say, if that didn’t sound so soft, but he is a
gentleman,
whereas
Lord
fuckin’ Alfred treats me like shit on his shoe.

Either way, though, I get paid, so what’s the bleedin’ difference—rough or gentle,
they
call the tune, though it’s always him that pays, always. I’ve never see the lord dip into his dusty upper-class pocket and I doubt I ever will.

Bosie likes nothing better than to spit in my face and bark obscenities as he spends, while Mr Wilde—or Oscar as he’s requested I call him—will stroke my hair and call me his boy as he comes between my thighs, for he doesn’t like to fuck, he likes to slide his prick between my spittle-slicked and hairless haunches. As he does it, he describes the curve of my roseleaf lips or the beaten gold of my hair, the blossoming bud of my cheeks—things like that. And to tell the truth such tenderness always makes me feel more unsettled than the lord’s barked curses, but they also make me feel warm and strange.

Last night Oscar took me to an orgy held in the grand house of a Member of Parliament, a Tory. We had to travel somewhere way out west, way beyond anywhere I’d ever been. I lost recognition of the city not long after we passed Marble Arch, and as we rode there in a carriage he held forth as usual and I sat there listening, not understanding a word of it, as usual.

“Like plants we strive toward the light,” he began, and I settled back to enjoy listening. “If we don’t understand something we say we are in the dark, or we ask for some light to be shed. Indeed, ‘Let there be light,’ was God’s incantation for Life itself. The cold light of day as opposed to the dead of night, clarity versus obscurity, the purpose and virtue of the Enlightenment. The Light of Reason. Also, alas, its fatal flaw, for we are whole only when we take into account our shadow, for the shadow holds a knowledge all its own; the night contains another truth no less important for its occluded and tenebrous nature.”

He lit an opium cigarette and filled the cab with the sickly-sweet smell. After taking several drags, he handed it to me and continued.

“Because the night makes us blind, we fear it, forgetting that the blind develop other senses, forgetting that in the night-time, during those brief sightless hours, we
feel
so much more. In the blackened, cabbalistic looking-glass of the night hours, our own faces appear. Incarcerated in the dark cell of night are the things we wish to hide, a wisdom the daylight hours refute or disavow. Light and dark, like good and evil, far from being opposites, turn out to be complements. And it is the task of the artist to enter the dank cave of the sunless hours and recount everything that he sees there.”

He turned to me and stroked my cheek, offering the smallest of smiles as he plucked the cigarette from my lips. “Only in darkness can men truly be themselves, and therefore night is holier than day,” he said. “As Michelangelo tells us, knowing only too well of what he speaks, I have no doubt.”

Suddenly the carriage stopped, and he gave my balls a quick squeeze before the door was opened by the driver. I stepped down onto the gravel. The horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells. Before us stood a large white stone house. Each of the eight windows facing us was shuttered like a closed eye. A wide gravel path led up to a large black front door, flanked by two white stone pillars. The house stood in its own grounds, the lawn around it populated with full green trees. There was the faintest trace of some strange music seeping through the still summer air, and my stomach danced to its rhythm. Me and Oscar walked to the front door. Oscar rang the bell, and I could feel the familiar hunger for pleasure stirring in my privates. A small window opened in the black wood, and a solitary eyeball surveyed us, blue as the moon. The hole blinked shut again and the door fell open, revealing a bearded man dressed as a shepherdess with a heavily painted face, who admitted us into a large entrance hall. Before us rose a wide staircase.

The bearded shepherdess told me I had to undress the minute we were inside, which I did while Oscar remained clothed.

“Aren’t you joining in?” I asked.

“No, Jack,” he said, “I’m here purely for research purposes,” and he wandered off, turning around to say, “Prepare to meet the Bacchae.”

I had no idea what on earth he meant by that. I stood and watched him begin to climb the stairs until Bo Peep pushed me forward and pointed to a set of double doors to the left. I staggered forward as two naked young men with golden pricks strapped to them pulled the doors open and, as I stepped inside, I was for a moment if not dazzled at least bewildered. A thousand lamps of varied form filled the room with a strong yet hazy light. There were wax tapers glowing in massive candlesticks, and lamps covered with jewels hung from the ceilings, illuminating the scene below. Although the room was very large, the walls were all covered with dirty pictures, every imaginable mixing of bodies and species. The outskirts of the room were furnished with faded old couches, and men, young and old, and almost all naked, were lounging in twos and threes. I walked slowly around the room, taking it all in. I watched one young lad eat caviar from the puckered hole of another (at least I hoped it was caviar). Another man drank wine from a boy’s backside as if he were a fountain. One man was popping grapes into his arsehole and shooting them into the gaping mouth of another. I saw a man spooning honey onto his erection and pushing the sticky member into the waiting mouth of another. In one corner a circle of men were frigging themselves and passing a golden goblet from one to the other, filling it with their relish. Once it was full, they passed the goblet again, only this time each man drank from it. I saw a man pull a string of pearls from his lover’s fundament and then wrap them around the neck of his lover before placing his tongue where the pearls had been. One man was pushing a lit candle up another, who was positioned upside down on a divan, transformed into a human candlestick. The wax began to run down the sides of the candle-shaft and pour across the boy’s flesh to solidify in thick white tears.

At the sight of all this action I need hardly say my own cock fairly crowed, and I leapt upon the nearest group to have some fun, knowing that, somewhere up there in the dark of the balcony that ran around the top of the room, Oscar was sitting watching. Somehow that seemed to add to my pleasure.

A band of musicians, naked but for turbans out of which sprang the blue and silver eyes of peacock feathers, played rhythmic and hypnotically strange music to which one young man danced, peeling veils from his body to reveal his cock standing to attention, strings of pearls coiled around his neck and looping underneath his bollocks. He thrust and moved his hips to the music. Smoke from opium pipes filled the air, and I sidled up to one man who was smoking and took a drag. I lay back and was immediately lost in a sea of bodies, all stroking and licking and nibbling me. Pleasure became the air I breathed and my flesh became a wave in which I bathed. I lay there as prick after prick erupted onto me and I drowned in that hot pleasure and my body shook.

As I lay there, spent, there was a sudden crash of cymbals and a floorshow began. The gold curtains against the far wall parted, and two men walked in carrying a third trussed like a sow, hanging upside down by his ankles and wrists from a pole yoked between the shoulders of the two carriers. All three men were naked, and the two carriers both had standing rods already. They stopped in the middle of the room, and the two carriers turned to face the third. Then they moved nearer to him till the cock of one could be pushed into his mouth and the cock of the other into his backside, as if he were being roasted on a spit. Then another man stood up from the crowd and pushed his cock into the boy’s arse, also. I’d never before seen an arse accommodate two cocks. More naked men came from behind the curtain, each wearing a golden bull’s head mask and each frigging himself furiously, hips moving to the music, which became more frantic as if in response to their movements. The crowd began cheering and clapping. A mouth on my cock stirred me from my reverie, and pretty soon the spectators had joined in with the spectacle.

In one corner, jets of water poured down from the open mouths of three cherubs, under which you could cleanse yourself, emerging refreshed and ready to start again. It was sunrise before we left, and I was well and truly spent, my head in the clouds and my body exhausted and exhilarated at one and the same time.

As I was dressing in the hallway, Oscar descended the staircase.

“Did you enjoy yourself, Jack?” he said with a smirk.

A grin split my face as I said I had, and I began recounting in my mind some of the joys of the evening.

“What about you?” I asked, as we climbed into the carriage. “Did you have a good time?”

“Oh, yes. I have enough material to keep me going for a long while. How’s that adorable rump?” and he slid a hand under my nancy and gave it a squeeze. My arse was sore after being fucked every which way, though I mustered a brief smile for the old lech. He looked out of the carriage window as we were rolling down Chelsea Embankment and said, “Ah this cold blue city, where danger is so near to pleasure.” I looked out of the window too, at that teeming mysterious city bathed in the pink light of dawn, and gave a yawn, leaning into him and drifting into sleep.

1954

Before I married Joan,
I went to see the family doctor, an elderly, no-nonsense man with a walrus moustache and matching eyebrows. I expressed my concern that I would not make a suitable husband, hinting at my lack of sexual interest in women and my desire for men. I had no word to express that desire, beyond derogatory and repellent terms I’d heard at work, words I could never in a million years apply to myself. Only last year a newspaper article referred to us as “these evil men.” Back then, in the 1930s, it felt as if I was confessing to mass murder. I was racked with nerves as I stuttered my words, hardly able to speak, hoping above anything that he wouldn’t mention it to my parents. He heard me out and then, after a pause, said, “Colin, such anxiety is understandable, all men go through it, but believe me, when it comes to it, John Thomas will be raring to go and nature’s way will lead him to where he needs to be.”

I asked whether there was a cure for men like me.

He said, “Marriage is the best cure. Once you’ve got a lovely wife providing all you need, you’ll soon forget all this silliness. You don’t want to go meddling in all that, or you’ll find yourself behind bars quicker than you can say ‘Oscar Wilde.’ Trust me.”

But, of course, he was wrong.

It shocks me and thrills me to hear Gore’s stories. I’ve always been too ashamed of my desires, too crushed by my onerous flesh. Always too terrified of losing control. What an idiot I’ve been. Here is this young man whose body is available to anyone with the cash to spend, or those he takes a shine to when he’s up on Hampstead Heath, or in Russell Square, who is so devoid of shame without being what those who call themselves moral would call shameless, that one simply cannot see anything but limitless joy in what he does. He holds the key to pleasure, and lives, it seems to me, a long, long way from the shadows we expect to be cast by such sin.

His recklessness shocks and intrigues me, and fills me with envy too. He recounts these escapades of his with a childlike glee, seeming not to care that he’s done something most people would consider not simply wrong but depraved, evil, immoral. He told me today about his adventures in a darkened toilet last night, and my face must have betrayed me because he said, “Oh, Colin, have I shocked you?” and laughed. And yet to see his body laid out before me, twisted and knotted into a conundrum of skin, one would almost think him a virgin, so pure, so unsoiled does he look. He is a paradox made flesh, a living question mark, a breath of fresh air compared to the death rattle I feel myself to be. He makes me wonder what I’ve done with my life. And he knows not at all that all these emotions, all these unanswerables, have arisen in me since we met, like an army of skeletons from scattered teeth.

Gore’s curiosity is for pleasure and is pursued with a hunger so huge I cannot fathom it. Yet I cannot accuse him of anything other than following his desires—something, surely, for which I at least have to commend him, having never dared open myself up to the possibility of unadulterated pleasure. I’ve always been too much of a coward, held in check by my fear of blackmail or prosecution. And most of all by guilt—that most futile of emotions. The danger appears to mean nothing to him. If anything, it would seem to goad him on to greater recklessness. Yet such recklessness is as attractive as it is shocking.

Ironically (though, perhaps not), I have found myself thinking a lot about my death since I met Gore. I suppose it is because I have also been thinking more about my life, which his throws into a relief so stark it terrifies me. There is no such thing as security, I know that now. We think that there is, or that it is something we can construct: a safe life, a secure life. But that turns out to be no life at all. I feel as if I have lived in a state of catatonia all my life, an automaton. For I have lived without joy, terrified of feeling anything strange or unknown, battening down my emotions and my hunger and my curiosity like a door against a coming storm. This beautiful, inarticulate boy has shown me what it means to feel alive. And he doesn’t have the first clue about this chaos I can feel dancing within me. Doesn’t know that he is responsible for instigating this tempest in my soul.

Today I found myself pondering something that it surprises me I haven’t contemplated already, for its inevitability strikes me as so patently obvious it seems foolish to deny it. It occurred to me upon reading the above that it would be so easy to unfurl a few bank notes and taste that flesh that lies before me each week like a meal of which I deprive myself, that flesh that glows and glistens and haunts my dreams. What, I ask myself, is to stop me becoming just another of Gore’s customers or whatever he calls these men who buy him? He frequently gets erections in my presence and my palms sweat so much I can’t hold the pencil, and my mouth runs dry. But it would be so easy to reach across and touch it, touch him. Perhaps too easy. Do I want to become just another old man whose hungry mouth repulses? Whose presence deadens? Whose adoration means nothing unless represented by money? That fate is one I dare not risk.

The problem, of course, is that in my own stupid and pompous way I’ve convinced myself that we are friends, and I fear that sex, even as the most straightforward financial transaction, would scupper that. He talks to me so openly, and seems to like my company. I am flattered, I admit. I get the impression that very few people he meets ever pay much attention to what Gore has between his ears, so busy are they contemplating what he has between his legs. He’s not the brightest button in the tin, I’ll admit, but he likes to talk. The three hours we work together go so quickly. He shames me into admitting there’s a world out there of which I know very little. Perhaps I should just offer him the money, and do exactly what I want to do, if I am honest with myself. I’m a bigger fool than I imagine if I think he might do it out of love or friendship. Perhaps to be paid is exactly what he is angling for. It would certainly pay better than simply modelling for me. What’s to stop me?

Recently, I have been putting aside my drawings more and more and sidling up to him when we take a break. It’s become quite natural to hold him as we talk, hold that warm naked flesh in my arms, against my chest, and though I fear he may detect the violence of my heartbeat, or the hardness in my crotch, I do not move away. I know it makes him uncomfortable, but his discomfort pleases me, makes me want to do it more.

Today, though, he began crying all of a sudden, as I held him. I didn’t know what to do, he was sobbing like a baby. Eventually he calmed down enough to explain that today is the twentieth anniversary of his brother’s death. He said that he’d been trying not to think about it all day. It seems the brother died in an accident when they were small children and Gore blames himself somehow. I reassured him that it wasn’t his fault. I suggested we call it a day and go for a walk down by the river, and I stood up and left him to get dressed in private, which seems so silly in retrospect.

It was a beautiful day, and as we walked, Gore told me about his brother, recounting pranks they had played and adventures they had shared. They were so close in age as to be practically twins. I’d never thought to ask about siblings, perhaps because I lack any, but it seems he is from a large family. Ten on the last count, though he hasn’t seen his family in thirteen years, and has never mentioned them before.

A little routine has developed during his visits. After a couple of hours’ drawing, he dresses, and we go down to the kitchen. I start to prepare some food for us to share, while he uncorks a bottle of wine and pours out two glasses. We talk some more, and he tells me about his sex life once the wine has loosened his tongue, and I laugh to mask my jealousy. I laugh. But I don’t know if I am jealous or envious. Do I want him, or the experiences he recounts with such attention to detail that I am aroused by them? I don’t know.

The Greeks placed greater value on the emotion of love than on the object. If one felt love, that was enough, and there was never any question of whether the object of one’s love deserved such adoration. The emotion justified the object, not
vice versa
. The beloved was good because he was loved, not loved because he was good. Nowadays, when the notion of love has become so desecrated, and the chances of its existence made almost impossible as a consequence, one must love only the good. To love the bad is considered a pathology. To love the bad is to reveal one’s sickness, one’s own badness, and that revelation is tantamount to the peal of a leper’s bell.

I am unclean. I love this vulgar, inarticulate male, with his coarse tongue and his wolfish grin. I love his crude and immediate attitude to life, his lack of respect for authority, his cynical negativity toward everything, coupled with a limitless curiosity and hunger for joy. I love the rugged contempt in which he holds me and those like me, coupled with a reverence characteristic of his class. A mocking reverence, a loosely veiled contempt. As if I represent a world for which he feels nothing but a mixture of pity and anger.

I showed him some of my drawings today, and he was so genuinely enthusiastic about them that I signed one and gave it to him. He was so appreciative that it was touching, the way he read what I had written at the bottom of the sketch, some words about how inspirational he has been. He stood there staring at the drawing like a child on Christmas morning.

I lie awake at night, feeling his absence as if he were a lover I have woken up to find gone. I imagine him returning from the bathroom and crawling back in beside me, caressing me for warmth, moaning with sleepy contentedness. It is strange, because I have always loved to sleep alone. Even during my years with Joan, we slept in separate beds, apart from on our honeymoon, when we found ourselves rolling to opposite sides of the bed every night to place as great a distance as possible between our bodies. But now all I feel is lonely. I lie on my back in this bed and imagine it is a coffin.